Animalia

And then there's this little nerd:

SABA!

We got a new kitchen table awhile back. Our old table was a bar-style one, with stools and a tall table, but this one is more traditional, lower with standard chairs. The other day I walked into the kitchen and Saba was just sitting on a chair, like, just sitting there at the table, hanging out. We don't mind if the cats get on the table (yes, we're those people) or anywhere really. They pretty much take over whatever they want to take over, beds, chairs, table, closet shelves, dressers, bookshelves, windowsills, everything. We have made space for two large, multilevel, carpeted "cat trees" in our tiny casita, but they spend very little time there.

Saba's not really a table sitter and she doesn't really beg for food, but recently she's taken to wanting to be up on the table when someone is sitting there. Like today, I was working on my new computer and she jumped up on the table and had to have some pets and cuddle.

YAWN!!

That's all fine, except she loves to sit on the keyboard, which is annoying. I usually distract her with a few treats and she moves off to one side for a little while. 

Whither, Weather, Mother Nature

We're having quite a spectacular little thunder and lightning storm as I type this. Last night, the drone of cicadas welcomed dusk. But tonight, it's big, big booms.

I've always loved the sound of cicadas. My grandmother's house sat next to an irrigation ditch and, when I was a child, the unpaved ditch was the water source for huge trees, including a large, old cottonwood that grew in my grandmother's yard. Those trees would be filled with the droning rattle of cicadas all summer long. I used to love to just lie there and listen to them.

We hear them so rarely anymore, victims as they are, I'm sure, to the disappearance of trees after the ditches were paved and now with the drought, and the effect of our dearly beloved insecticides, and and and. It's the same with horned toads, which we used to run across all summer long. I haven't seen one of those in years. Decades. Or delicate stick insects, which used to climb into the fruit trees in our backyard when I was a child. Those are gone now, too.

We have grasshoppers, cockroaches, mosquitoes, aphids, and ticks now, sturdy bottom feeders that can survive the worst of what we throw at them.

Last summer, we had a handful of snakes as visitors in our garden and yard. They were living on grasshoppers, I think, which in turn were living on our ground cherries. This year, I haven't seen our snakes. I hope they've just moved on to greener pastures, not that anything bad happened to them.